With cops as interpreters, suspects at risk, critics say

Omar Aguirre had been in this country for only two years and knew little English when he found himself being questioned in the slaying of a Chicago-area furniture store owner.

"I still don't really know why they arrested me or what happened," the 34-year-old Mexico City native said in Spanish recently, recounting how a police officer acting as his interrogator and interpreter told a state's attorney he had confessed to the crime.

FOR THE RECORD - This story contains corrected material, published Aug. 15, 2003.

Aguirre served five years of a 55-year prison term before a 2002 federal probe determined others were responsible.

In the wake of his case, and others that they say are similar, advocates, experts and consular officials are calling for independent interpreters to be present during interrogations.

In Chicago, Spanish-speaking detectives with a stake in the outcome of interrogations often translate a suspect's statement for a prosecutor who speaks little or no Spanish. Such situations not only produce unreliable confessions, experts argue, but they could be violating a suspect's civil rights.

Mexican officials and their representatives have clamored for better protection for Spanish-speaking suspects as Chicago's Mexican population has ballooned, and Northwestern University lawyers have recently begun cataloging what they consider to be problem cases.

All of them are eager to see what happens when authorities come under a new mandate to videotape interviews in homicide investigations.

Sandra Babcock, lead attorney for the Mexican foreign ministry's Mexican Capital Legal Assistance Program, said the situation is ripe for change.

"The evolution should be for rules that say police cannot act as their own interpreters," Babcock said. "They are not neutral, and many of them are not qualified."

The detective who questioned Aguirre in Spanish said he had implicated himself in the crime. The officer's English translation of the alleged statement, which Aguirre denied and could not even read, bolstered another man's testimony that later was found to be false. No videotape documented the police interview.

Many suspects who find themselves in such situations are poorly educated, culturally impaired and often have an ingrained fear of police that they developed before arriving here. It's a recipe for disaster when they are matched against aggressive detectives eager to close a case, experts said.

Northwestern's Cathryn Crawford is leading a project to catalog such interrogations for the Children and Family Justice Center of the Northwestern Legal Clinic.

She said the issue gains attention whenever a high-profile case like the one against Aguirre comes to light, but she suspects there are many more. The Police and Community Data Collection Project will help identify patterns, Crawford said.

"Even an officer who is not deliberately engineering something can lead people toward a false confession," she said.

When a non-English speaker finds himself in police custody, she said, it's an unfamiliar environment.

"They know something's wrong and then suddenly someone appears speaking their native language," Crawford said. "You're automatically going to be more trusting of those people. You're going to feel like they care, and you might listen if they say, `If you go along with this, then everything's going to go better for you.'"

Police and prosecutors bristle at any suggestion that detectives are untrustworthy, and they say there is a great deal of value in detectives questioning a suspect directly instead of through an interpreter.

"I trust the detectives to do the right thing," said 1st Assistant Cook County State's Atty. Robert Milan. "I don't believe a detective is going to make up a confession and tell the assistant state's attorney that this is what the guy said."

Still, advocates said it would help maintain the integrity of the process for interpreters to be called in on cases. Such interpreters could be employed by the county but be available to cover the city as needed, they said.

A confession, even a false one, is nearly insurmountable in court, attorneys said.

"The one thing juries always ask is, `Why would the police lie?'" said Marijane Placek, Aguirre's public defender.

Mexican Consulate officials said they could be called 24 hours a day to provide someone to translate, and in fact should be called as soon as a Mexican national is taken into custody in accordance with the Geneva Convention.

Illinois has at least 100 pending cases, most of them in Chicago, in which a Mexican defendant could face the death penalty if convicted, said Rita Vargas Torregrosa, Mexican consul in Chicago.

Mexican consul weighs in

Recently, Torregrosa was among those protesting the case against Veronica Diaz, who faces the death penalty after allegedly confessing to the 1997 murder of her son in a document written in English.